Our Radical Joy for Hard Times motto is “Finding and making beauty in wounded places.”

Both the finding and the making of beauty are essential to living with—and acting on behalf of—places that are damaged or endangered. It’s also true for how we live with what’s hurting in our world.

“Finding beauty” is not an explicit part of RadJoy’s 5-Step RadJoy Practice. That startlement—what I call in my book the “shock of beauty”—that we discover in a place that’s been cut down, poisoned, paved, burned, or flooded usually comes during Step 3, when we take time to “Get to Know the Place as It Is Now”.

It is then that the place surprises us. Often, we come to a wounded place thinking we already know all we need to know about it, and we assume we’re not going to like anything it has to reveal. Yet, when we take a few minutes to notice, to tune in to the reality of the place, we are often astonished by the resilience of the Earth as its beings—plants, animals, waters, winds—persevere and move into the cracks the damage has left.

We cannot hurry this discovery of beauty. We can simply be open to it in whatever form it takes.

“Make a Gift of Beauty for the Place” is the last of the 5 Steps. However, as we gain experience with this practice, we discover that we can make beauty more often, more spontaneously, and in more different kinds of circumstances than we previously thought possible. We make the RadJoy Bird on the stump of a cut tree. We bow to a deer killed on the highway. And suddenly we realize that offering beauty not only to places, but to humans as well, comes naturally.

It is always possible to find and make beauty!